In my mid-20s, I went for a run with my dog and around a mile in I found that I was exhausted in a way that was out of the ordinary for me. Over the course of the next week, I kept expecting to feel better when I woke up and somehow I kept feeling worse. I had a thriving business designing aquariums at the time and arrived at a client’s house and looked at the staircase in front of me and thought “there’s no way I can make it to the top of those stairs.” That was the final day of me being able to do my job.
I kept getting sicker and sicker over the following months; I was so exhausted I couldn’t get out of bed and my brain stopped working well at all. I forgot people’s names, I couldn’t keep track of even basic information, and my body hurt all the time. When I went to doctors, they had no answers for me and just told me I needed to exercise or that I was depressed. I kept expecting things to get better and they only got worse. I began to stutter uncontrollably and it felt like my skin was on fire all day every day. As it seemed like every system of my body was malfunctioning, I had a medical professional tell me I’d likely be in a wheelchair the rest of my life and other similarly horrifying predictions. Eventually, after about a year, I was prescribed a heavy dose of antibiotics and a lot of the acute problems began to fade.
I was told I had Lyme Disease and that I’d be fine now, but I still experienced crippling fatigue, brain fog, intense pain, and bizarre neurological symptoms that nobody seemed to be able to explain. I was lucky enough to be able to try a huge variety of treatments and modalities aimed at helping me recover. Some of them helped but most didn’t. And it seemed like so many people were offering a magic bullet solution that would cure me overnight and they were expensive and just didn’t work very well. With the help of some amazing practitioners, dedication, and experimentation I was able to find practices that helped me to feel better and get back to a point where I could play sports sometimes and begin to get back to doing the things that made my life feel full. I would still regularly have stretches where I felt awful and couldn’t get out of bed for a month, but it didn’t feel like I was sentenced to lifelong misery.
It took about seven years of feeling good sometimes and sometimes feeling like my whole body was in pain and my bones weighed a million pounds, but eventually I found the ingredients both in terms of practices and lifestyle that allowed me to feel better than I had ever felt before.
When I first learned the science of how the nervous system functions, I was able to look back at the course of my recovery and saw that the thread that connected all of the things that worked the best, whether they were practices or some lifestyle shift, was that they help with nervous system regulation. Since then, I’ve studied many of these modalities and incorporated them into helping clients not only with chronic pain and illness, but all of the other seemingly insurmountable obstacles that keep them from having a life they love amidst the challenges of the modern world.
Living with pain, illness, or physical limitations can be isolating and seemingly impossible, so I try to bring some lightheartedness and a sense of optimism to this work. But not, you know, the annoying kind. I believe that the best approach always starts with as full of an understanding of what my clients have been through as possible. I am trained in Nervous System Regulation Coaching, Pain Reprocessing Therapy, Tension and Trauma Release Exercises, and Counseling. I’m a lifelong lover of sports, cooking, creative writing, and being in, on, and around the water.
